Driving Mr. Albert Quotes

“In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses!”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“What if I forget her voice?' Sara said.
'You won't,' I said. 'You sound just like her.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“I feel something I can't quite put my finger on, something euphoric but deeply unsayable. Is it love or just not hate? Is it joy or just not sadness?”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“I can hear beer cans softly pattering down on the pavement, then nothing.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“She gives off an aura of enormous sadness, though her powers of humor and forgiveness seem to run equally as deep.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“And my parents, whose end I can't imagine. And then, of course, me, the one trying to find a reason for living in the first place.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost,' he wrote to the Queen Mother of Belgium in 1953, 'one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“And while his brain kept whirring with the problems of a unified theory, his body became frail and thin, wrinkles fell over him like elephant skin, and began to slouch, as if with each new day he was carrying a slightly heavier pack on his back.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“One gets the impression that when this house is full there's probably nothing here but love and a hell of a racket.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“She's a woman who enjoys the liberal use of first names.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“He begins by quoting Thoreau: 'The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“There's an amazing release that comes when you drive coast to coast, when you plug one ocean into another in your mind. And the wake of your travel fills with a kind of awe and love for everyone and everything and every animal and every roadside diner you've seen between the two.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Sometimes even the believers forget what they believe.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“She stands up in a short black and gold dress, looking like someone's risque aunt in age denial at a wedding.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“I try again, with the friendliest-looking man I can find. He's middle-aged and round-bellied, like his group of friends, all wearing University of Wisconsin sweatshirts emblazoned with the schools mascot, Bucky Badger.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“When put to it, I can be an alright conversationalist. But I find openings are always tricky.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Good night, Senator,' I say, and he looks at me as if he's in the presence of someone unraveling, which he may be.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“... sun sinking, sky filling with pink and orange light, great expanses of land just sitting, seemingly waiting for the return of big creatures to make it small again.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“I realize I've forgotten how very simple a little straight-up love can be: 'I am the leg of you,' reads one line.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert : A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“I'll keep these same photographs pinned to a wall above my desk as tiny parables.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“If he was dismissed and despised by the local folk in life, the economics of his immorality have called for his complete resurrection.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“... as the American mind moves from the imprisoning whimsy of cities through some harder-boiled practicality to the eagle flight of the West.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Everything is heaped in the frigid no-smell of winter, cars skidding, then running off roadsides into gullies.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“It's so deceptively easy to get people to stop trusting their own senses. They cut you off and then put fear in you.”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“Days pass and years pass and you light the holy candle of yourself by the glimmer of someone else, and just when you think you're burned out on her, you realize that she's the single thing that raises you above yourself. And now she's dumped you flat and taken up with a lumberjack or that sensitive guy in town who runs the bookstore or the FedEx man who wears tight shorts in the summer. That guy? How could she?”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain

“But then where is she?
It's a simple question but once it's been asked, a floodgate of questions follow: What if something's happened?”
― Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain